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Please disregard my previous indication that I will be readying Lingua-U for release early next year. Upon immersing myself in an unfinished section of the book, I realize that it will take more time than I anticipated. I will post an update when the draft of the entire book is complete.

Meanwhile, check out The Kalendar website for the latest progress on the project. I will resume posting daily updates to The Kalendar on December 22.

Have you heard about the Supreme Court case on anti-gay discrimination by a wedding cake baker? I won’t give you the details, but I’m including a couple of links for that.

In The New York Times, philosopher John Corvino argues that the Supreme Court should uphold the rights of a gay couple because, after a thorough analysis of the details of the case, “freedom of speech and freedom of religion do not exempt business owners from public accommodations laws.”

Andrew Sullivan praises Corvino’s argument, but disagrees. In NY Magazine, he writes, “The baker is clearly not discriminating against an entire class of people; he is refusing to endorse a particular activity that violates his faith.” Ergo, Sullivan without quite saying so explicitly takes the side of the conservative Christians.

What animates Sullivan’s column is his turn to focus on the cultural issues as opposed to the legal ones. After chastising gays for not taking freedom of expression seriously enough and chastising Christians for not living up to Jesus’s example, he concludes, “In other words, if the liberals were more liberal, and the Christians more Christian, this case would never have existed. It tells you a great deal about the decadence of our culture that it does.”

On the legal case, it’s a close call but I think Corvino has the stronger case of the two. He argues that the Court has frequently recognized that identity and activities cannot be completely separated in some cases. He quotes the late Justice Scalia as saying,“A tax on wearing yarmulkes is a tax on Jews.” Thus, with Corvino, I think the better legal argument is on the side of upholding the anti-discrimination law.

But Sullivan is also 100% right to focus on the cultural problems. Gay activists frequently treat advocates of religious liberty as wicked opponents, neglecting to acknowledge the partial validity of their claims. Perhaps gay rights could progress faster and with less backlash if conservatives were not unnecessarily put on the defensive to feel their religion was at stake.

And the real battle for ending discrimination by Christians against gays will not be won in the courtroom, but in the pews and divinity schools. The work of doing better, more honest, more Christian ethics must happen in Christian churches before real changes can occur.

Whatever happens in the Supreme Court, the most important battlefields of this culture war will remain.

You can call it Agape or God’s Love (or Parental Love) or Compassion or even the principle of inclusion. In Integral theory, Agape is not just the love of one person for another, it is akin to the holonic tenet of self-immanence (the tenet to complement Eros/self-transcendence on the vertical axis of evolution).

Eros calls us to be better, greater than we are; Agape calls us accept who we are and All-That-Is.
Eros calls us to make the world more whole by perfecting it; Agape calls us to make the world more whole by seeing and feeling and knowing the wholeness that’s already present, even when that wholeness breaks our heart.

Conventional political discussions see politics as a war of winners and losers, right and wrong, a clash of polar opposites in perpetual war with each other. The red states at war with the blue states; the individual in a clash with the society or the state; classes at war; sexes at war; the powerful at war to with the oppressed; the enlightened at war with the ignorant; the Nietzschean great men and women at war with the herd; and so on.

Conventional political discussions don’t usually talk about Eros and Agape, but ours in this forum sometimes do. Because in each conflict in our midst, we feel drawn by transpersonal forces or sense of identity to overcome our challenges, moving in the direction of Progress’s arrow (Eros) or to accept the dignity of Being, conserving hard-won order and coherence and stability from tradition and previous generations (Agape).

In my own Integral Konstruct (Lingua-U, a model based on sacred linguistics), the word “Eros” (𝌩⚎) signifies the Yin Master at the Seat of Actualization at ⚍𝌀 (Ʒ or/zh/), The Letter of Enfoldment, the climax of the 4th-person-perspective known as Systemic-Mind (teal), at the gate of the Second Tier. The way I tell its story, Eros is the Arrow that turns every Error or Errand in the Systemic-Mind into Motion. Eros receives the Yang of Empathy and Emptiness and combines it with the Yin of Ʒɛdiɛ (a word from the Chinese 折疊 for Folding) and Ʒɛnmi (a word from the Chinese 縝密 for Careful, Deliberate). The result is a powerful force that is capable of Ʒænlɪŋ (a word from the Chinese 佔領 for Occupying, Holding a Position).

Thus, when we talk about “Eros” in politics, we are really talking about a force that isn’t visible to everyone. At the first-person-perspective, Eros is nowhere in sight, there is Power at the Letter of Positivity; at the second-person-perspective, Eros has yet to appear, but there is the Thug of Thought or Myth at the Letter of Synthesis; at the third-person-perspective, Eros has not yet come, but there is Technique and Truth at the Letter of Tending. Only with the arrival of Systemic-Mind at the fourth-person-perspective which opens with the Throne of Evolution does the Throne of Eros arrive as its ultimate resolution.

It’s the job of Eros to seal the arrival of Evolution itself into a form of greater self-awareness. Like a black widow spider’s mate, E-RO-s is willing to risk the massive disorder at the heart of Ent-RO-py to get what it wants, even death itself. Eros will take enormous risks – to the point of threatening all that has come before it. The old systems are being torn down, but new ones have yet to rise. The status quo is maligned, but anarchy threatens. The Yang phase of the Second Tier ends with Eros’s fruition, but it is a perilous ending, a rising up and a centering into tremendous difficulty and uncertainty. Eros has created Chaos, which must be addressed.

As the Lingua-U continues to tell the story of consciousness, the 5th-person-perspective known as Global-Mind (turquoise) swings into view after the departure of the Throne of Eros. It comes in the month of the White Horse with the Throne of Gaia which presents the words Abysmal and the Apocalypse. Its purpose is manifold: to rescue the Earth, the seat of our Existence itself, in a time of perilous urgency, through enacting Konstructs which can create a civilized culture and sustainable economy and ecology.

Symbolized by the Element of Earth (⚏ or Double Yin) and containing both the words for Gaia and Earth itself, the 5th-person-perspective, is humanity’s last best shot at avoiding collapse of all that has come before it. Its central most concern – the 𝌮𝌃 or Yin-Yin-Yin-Yin-Yin-Yung spot – is the Conservative impulse itself as the Throne of Communion (the holonic tenet associated with conservation).

Whereas the Systemic-Mind (green/teal) was ready to take any risk to thwart the First Tier systems and replace them with something new, the Global-Mind is about nitty-gritty Governance and refining Attunements, not Shocking the Systems. Furthermore, the Global-Mind is concerned with Collectivism. The words for both Capitalism (𝌯⚌) and Equalization (𝌯⚏) are polarities which are ultimately reconciled in Communes or Communism (𝌯𝌅) at the Throne of Adjustment. The words for Commune and Consciousness are identical to six degrees of energy.

In my story, there are arguably no words of greater significance to the 5th-person-perspective than Agape (𝌮𝌂), Care (𝌮𝌂), and Compassion (𝌮𝌃). These three words are Yung Masters at the Seats of Structure and Concern respectively for the Letter of Constructing at the heart of the Turquoise structure. Remembering that Eros was the culminating energy of the 4th-person-perspective, Agape arrives to tame its excesses and correct its distortions. The Letter of Constructing basically sees the world and all of reality as a single collective, with each part a valuable unit of the group, all of which require care.

Care is extended to all, and it is this care which inspires all efforts at ameliorating harm and alleviating pathologies. Caring works by appreciating what has been unappreciated and conserving what has been mistreated or neglected. Agape, Caring, and Compassion are not the only values of the Letter of Constructing, but they are essential to this retelling of the story of Agape and Eros. Eros sought Pleasure and Treasure and brought Chaos; Agape must continue the story by riding in a White Horse to serve, govern, create, and make conscious.

The story of the 5th-person-perspective comes to a close with the Letter of Qualification (Q or ⚏𝌀). Many failed creations and cultures and constructs must be disqualified. Only those which contribute to Quality will meet the test of thrivability, survivability in synchronization with the last Konstructs standing. In the final analysis, the Quagmire created by the First Tier and early Second Tier of consciousness becomes a Quandry (𝌲𝌅). Hope remains, but if the Quandry is not resolved, the threat of Extinction (𝌳𝌄) is right around the corner.

I have no parenting or foster parenting experience to speak of, but I appreciate what you’re saying. Lingua-U aligns 39 letters with 3 unigrams, 9 bigrams, and 27 trigrams of the Chinese classic Tai Hsuan Ching (the “alternative I Ching”).

When Lingua-U comes out, it will be possible for any parent or educator to teach all 9 stations, AND 27 sub-stations, [of] consciousness — that’s 27 stages* AND 27 Enneagram-types — to children as young as 2 or 3 just by teaching them the alphabet (along with age-appropriate stories).

And folks like Dylan Newcomb have shown that you can actually dance with the subtle energy of letters when aligned to the I Ching. So children of 3 or 4 years old will be able to dance to it.

And Chinese mystics and martial artists have shown you can build martial arts systems like Tai Chi and Bagua Zhang by aligning attacks and defenses to the I Ching.

These magical systems are wicked useful for getting Integral to penetrate into how we educate youngsters. That’s cool.

* I didn’t use the word stages here in a way that’s consistent with my model. There are technically only nine major Stages, each with three Letters (not Levels), not 27. Exactly how to characterize Letter and Level as correlates within an Integral Theory — they share the same subtle signature to six degrees — is not clear to me at this time.

I’m considering renaming the indigo structure for the purposes of my own model. Ken Wilber calls it para-mind. I have floated the notion of calling it Over-Mind instead. But now I’m leaning towards X-Mind. X as in Extrasensory Perception, and the X in the Sixth Sense or the Sixth Station, and the X in Existentialism. Thoughts, anyone?

Nothing is nowhere near as exciting — and a bit scary — about Lingua-U as its capacity to open up an entirely new way of thinking about human nature and potential. That’s a big claim. What does it really mean?

It’s really quite simple. Unitive metalanguage offers a way of conceptualizing the subtle energetic shifts from one word to another (in any speakable language), so that we may inquire into the significance of such shifts in creative and predictable ways. For instance, look at the first eight marks of energy in two words: Merry (𝌽𝌂𝌁) and Melancholy (𝌽𝌂𝌄). Note that they are identical to seven degrees, but Merriness is Yang at the eighth mark whereas Melancholy is Yin.

Yang is traditionally associated with positivity and Yin with negativity, and merriness is considered a positive emotion and melancholy a negative one, so this makes sense. In this example, there’s something about the first seven marks of these two words that denotes a feeling that can be either positive or negative, but it is strongly a feeling of either happiness or sadness. This establishes one important baseline interpretation of the (𝌽𝌂𝌀) symbol, a reading that we can now factor into an analysis of other words which share the same signature such as Mare, Marry, Mary, Melon, Meld, or Melody.

In the case of Merriness and Melancholy, it is easy to see how a slight shift from Yang to Yin at the eighth energetic mark of a word can dramatically change the instantiation of a feeling from one of happiness to sadness. Now imagine a potential use for this fact in psychotherapy in which a patient with basic knowledge of Lingua-U is able to embody either the state of being Merry or being Melancholic, and then use the words as mantras to help them shift from a more relaxed or passive state to a more active state, moving from Melancholy to Merriness.

In the 1950s, Dr. John Weilgart used a constructed language called aUI to formulate the premises of what he called Logotherapy. He believed that when people took on a more creative approach to language based on the manipulation of primitive symbols of meaning that they could regain psychological health. Weilgart’s theories were tested in some treatment centers with veterans and other patients, and he reported significant success.

There’s a big difference between a possible future Logotherapy with Lingua-U and how Logotherapy worked with aUI. Weilgart’s patients had to learn a new language (albeit a simple one that some people grasped in an afternoon). A potential Logotherapy with Lingua-U has no such requirement because Lingua-U is a metalanguage that can be used to analyze whatever language a patient already knows, and give them a tool for working with and manipulating the subtle energies of the words they already know and use to describe their feelings.

exhilarate: to enliven; invigorate; stimulate; to make cheerful or merry.

In this Black Friday article in The Guardian,George Monbiot and other Systemic-Mind (green-to-teal) critics of neoliberalism are sure we need a new economic system to avoid catastrophe, and for all I know they are correct. That makes it all the more frustrating that these critics so far haven’t been able to design a better one.

In Lingua-U, the System’s Symbolic-Mind (𝌡𝌃) is the Yung Master at the Seat of Interiority at the Throne of Evolution, the first of nine stations of the Systemic-Mind (which corresponds to Green/Teal in Integral Theory). Related words at this Seat are Symbol, Sin, Situation, Psyche, Circle, and City.

Since Lingua-U arranges virtually every sound symbol in every language into a harmonious mandala, we may now ask: How does this systemic view of objective self grow up? What does it look like at, say, Global-Mind (turquoise) and Over-Mind (indigo)? After all, Systemic-Mind is the Yang to the Yin of Global-Mind, and the best features of each are ideally reconciled in the Yung of the Over-Mind. Surely it couldn’t hurt to wonder about this, at least as a fun challenge.

Lingua-U tells us that the Yin to the Yang of the System’s Symbols are words such as Up-Level, Apocalypse, Oppression, Approach, Guilt, and Gildedness (𝌪𝌃) at the Throne of Gaia. I think we can choose to see these words as an indication of the seriousness with which the turquoise consciousness arises. It is the first Station to see the Ecology in Crisis, the Earth as a Communal Ecosystem, and the need for an Up-Leveling Konstruct to Carry Us forward (all the words in capital letters are associated with this Station in Lingua-U).

What might the Over-Mind (the 6th-person-perspective in the language’s grammar) have to say about the way that Systems can be Up-Leveled, so that our Situation does not result in Apocalypse? Or: How can the Throne of Evolution and the Throne of Gaia be reconciled into a harmony? According to the Lingua-U Konstruct, the answer can be found at the Throne of Excitement. With the word Exhilaration (𝌳𝌃) (and the Serbo-Croatian word Opuʃtaai, meaning Loosening).

And so I’d invite us to reflect intuitively and with our highest sense of Self to see if there is a psychic or subtle wisdom in Exhilaration or Opuʃtaai which might help us to better see our Situation and derive an Approach.

Words such as Experience, Expression, Exit, Existence, Obedience, and Extra are important to this task. What I would propose is that the way forward to combining Systemic-Mind and Global-Mind insights is to design an Exit to our current systems based on the unstoppable requirements of Existence. Unless we Obey the requirements of perpetuating Existence itself, we cannot go forward. We must replace Gilded solutions (phony wealth, luxuries in a bubble of unsustainable wealth) with truly Excitement and Exhiliaration. In short, we need an economy based on providing human beings with enlivening and cheerful and merry Experiences with each other and the planet, generating happiness and a thrill for living not based on rampant consumerism.

Deep down, don’t we know that something like this is true? A shiny new giant-screen plasma TV or a Caribbean vacation is not necessary to increase life satisfaction. We need a culture based on self and collective Expressiveness, joyous and thrilling Experiences, in order to create Extra quality and abundance, not merely the illusion of wealth based on shallow satisfactions. The word Extraction is important to understanding the ultimate resolution of our experiences… do we persist in the Extractive and Exploitative processes of the systems of late capitalism? Are we sealed to the doom of Apocalypse on account of our Exploitation of Gaia? Or can we find an Īmaam (from the Arabic word for Model, Leader, Prayer Leader) with a way out? (In all the world’s languages, the only significant word to hold the subtle energy pattern of 𝌳𝌅, the Yung Master at the Seat of Goodness at the Throne of Excitement) is Īmaam, from Arabic.)

Our need for a new system is just the beginning. The exit may very well require new models, prototypes, and prayer leaders who can guide us into a new relationship to merriness and cheer. Perhaps we can only meet the world’s consumerism and materialism through a massive reconditioning of human beings warped by one dysfunctional system into new ways of relating to each other based on shared envigorating, enlivening experiences. Cultures and worldviews which can give people these experiences must rise up; cultures of death and dysfunction must recede.

In the Lingua-U Konstruct, such an answer is written in the phonemes of our Sacred Words, given to us now as a gift for up-leveling our imagination in pivotal times for our planet. When humankind rises from our current avant-garde of postmodern consciousness into higher and higher levels, we begin to bring online the capacity for enacting, constructing, and executing the visions that we need from deeper seats of truth.

Starting several years ago, around the time when I realized that the color term Beige in Lingua-U is spelled 𝌆⚎, I began to wonder if the actual color of the night sky (which looks black to our eyes) is Beige. This was not a scientific notion, just a passing musing. I’ve had visions of cosmic vessels that seemed to be floating in something that wasn’t dark at all. I’ve also had a dream or two in which the universe seemed beige.

Is this related to the recent scientific discovery that the average color of the universe is a variation of beige that is called Cosmic Latte? I wonder once more.

Cosmic Latte is a name assigned to the average color of the universe, given by a team of astronomers from Johns Hopkins University. In 2001, Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry determined that the color of the universe was a greenish white, but they soon corrected their analysis in a 2002 paper,[1] in which they reported that their survey of the color of all light in the universe added up to a slightly beigeish white. The survey included more than 200,000 galaxies, and measured the spectral range of the light from a large volume of the universe. The hexadecimal RGB value for Cosmic Latte is #FFF8E7.

I’m with you on the wanting of better maps of [the psychic and subtle] stages. If I’m right about Lingua-U and Kalendar, these projects will lay the foundations for those better maps. What sort of foundations? Magical foundations, beginning with a look at that the world’s sacred alphabets can tell us when analyzed in a new, cross-linguistic way through their hidden subtle energy patterns. If that’s not clear to people yet, I understand. It will take time to get the books out there and recover a healthy respect for these methodologies.

And it’s not just the psychic and subtle realms that have important distinctions that are undermapped… it’s all the stages up and down the spiral. I think people will be very interested to see all three “sub-stages”* of Global Mind (turquoise) when that’s ready to describe in print. If people understood this stage better, it would make the dysfunctional dynamics in the Integral community that we have seen in recent years much easier to explain. At least it works for me, I know that much. Getting feedback from others too is key.

If Lingua-U/Kalendar supply a workable magical map of these stages up through the Ngoongon (Meta-Mind fables), can workable mythic, rational, and pluralistic visions [maps] of these stages be far behind?

That’s an important question because I know there are some people right now in Integralland working on projects they think will fulfill Ken Wilber’s vision of a “GigaGlossary”, and I fear that they are doing so without having a sound magical foundation at the base. As I am using the term, Magic is the understanding of the large trove of humankind’s wisdom which is hidden patterns of sound symbolism and sacred alphabets. A GigaGlossary, by whatever name, needs to be rooted in smart, up-leveled Magic, or we’re in danger of attempting to execute some colossal blunders.

I think the movie title we must avoid at all costs is: 10 Easy Tips for Ruining a GigaGlossary (a.k.a. Integral Semiotics). Tip #1: Forget all about Magic.

* Not really sub-stages. Global Mind is comprised of three letters: the Letter of Integration (G), the Letter of Construction (K), and the Letter of Qualifying (Q). Letters are not Levels, but their sound-meaning is close, as is connoted by the fact that the words Letter and Level are themselves identical to six marks of subtle energy when translated into Lingua-U.

As you may know by now, although most integral thinkers focus on stages or structures or levels, I have increasingly focused on Stations instead. (The capital letter is meant to indicate that I use this term in a unique way, as a component of the Integral Magic (IM) system, to protect against misunderstandings.)

In IM, the Station may be viewed as either a stage/structure or a type. For example, Station Five corresponds to both the 5th-person-perspective in the grammar of Lingua-U as well as AQAL Integral theory, AND it corresponds to Enneagram Type 5, depending on how you are looking at it.

I think Stations are real. Yes, they’re part of a constructed system as I have come to understand them, but they refer to real human phenomena. Much of their magic in IM comes from the clustering phenomena in phonosemantics, that process whereby words with similar connotations or sound-meanings associate together. Other semantical processes also contribute to their strange workings, which seem like magic when it’s studied at length.

I am deepening my understanding of HOW Stations are able to represent both structures and types. The obvious answer is that they are “energy centers” of some kind; this vague answer would be readily accepted by esoteric thinkers because it’s the way thinkers have usually talked about similar ideas. So pocket that answer for now and consider something more precise.

According to the Ngoongon (meta-mind fables), Stations are basically a Shuttering of Shakti (energy, especially feminine energy) into Stable forms through an Evolutionary process. The STEI- sound gives them a stable form and the -SHUN sound unifies the SHUT- and the SHUK- principles. The ST- phoneme at the start of Station is identical to the EV- phoneme of Evolution in the Gematria of Lingua-U. Thus, the concept of the Station describes ways that evolution produces stabilized posts which trap Shakti energy in predictable ways.

When the Shakti energy travels in predictable channels in the human personality, the result is the types observed by psychologists, stable forms of the personality with predictable features. From the IM perspective, there are 27 types (9 major types with 3 variations each), corresponding to the Enneagram types and wings. This is the “horizontal” view.

And from the “vertical” view, eventually the Shakti accumulates in a range of stable patterns of mind which organize the formation of identity, cognition, values, and spirituality. Developmental scientists who have studied this phenomenon usually look at only one area at a time, thus leading to the notion that there are multiple “lines” of intelligence which develop somewhat independently. There is some truth to this, but the broader pattern ought not be overlooked: structures form which help us to form our mental worldviews, and by knowing these structures we can better navigate our challenges in the world. (Some of you may want to read what I’ve just said as: “I’m talking about the Mind line now.”)

The Nine Elements

Integralists are familiar with this concept, so I won’t elaborate on it at this time. But I will describe the names that I am using for the nine primal structures of the Nine Stations of Lingua-U. These are:

As you can see, the sound-symbols of these nine labels correspond to the letters at that Station. This is by design. This is important to the process by which the names of these nine structures, associated with the Nine Stations, begin to serve as mantras which help Integralists to access the Shakti at each of the Nine Stations in order to unlock its potential for healing, shadow work, growth, evolution, enlightenment, and reforming the world.

Because IM and AQAL use both color terms and structure labels in different and potentially confusing ways, it will be necessary to be careful in casual speech and written texts. Perhaps the greatest potential for confusion lies in the different ways the models use colors, for instance with AQAL’s Green and Teal both corresponding to IM’s Month of the Golden Egg. In IM, the Month of the Green Bowl actually refers to the para-mind or Indigo altitude. Additionally, AQAL uses Overmind (formerly causal) to describe the Ultraviolet altitude, but in IM the term Over-Mind will be used for Station Six, which is otherwise known as the para-mind (formerly psychic). I have tried to keep such oddities to the minimum, but overall I have had other concerns regarding the artistry of these names that took precedence over the benefit of matching to existing Integral models.

Henceforward, I will increasingly deprecate my use of the existing Spiral Dynamics vMEME labels and AQAL altitude labels to avoid confusion. Whenever possible, I will use these nine labels, with Systemic-Mind substituting for Green and Teal and Global-Mind substituting for Turquoise.

For comparison’s sake, you can see how these labels align (or don’t align) with the model of AQAL Integral theorist Ken Wilber (below):